From the course: How to Be More Inclusive

Developing inclusive meetings

From the course: How to Be More Inclusive

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Developing inclusive meetings

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- Many companies put their diversity and inclusion efforts into their hiring processes and stop there, but it's equally important to create more inclusive processes for your existing employees. If you work so hard at bringing people in the door, but don't put in the effort to make them truly feel valued and heard once they're actually employees, you're going to have disengaged employees and increased churn. In this lesson I want to dive in to how you can be more inclusive in meetings in particular. Similar to many hiring practices, meetings are entirely structured for extroverts and privilege. Your calendars are likely inundated with back-to-back meetings, where you have to quickly switch from discussing one project to another, and you aren't given much context ahead of the meeting to adequately prepare for it. The majority of airtime is taken up by the same few people, plus you may get called out by managers for not contributing to the discussion. Why do companies create meeting environments that don't allow for the critical thinking or creativity of half the population? There are a few simple ways you can change this. First, you can share the agenda ahead of the meeting. Give attendees more context on why the meeting is being scheduled, and what specific things you want them to consider and come prepared to discuss. Not only does this allow everyone to absorb the information and think about their ideas or questions they want to bring up, but it allows for individual brainstorming before the meeting. Otherwise you'll have to rely on group brainstorming where the loudest, and often most privileged voices in the room put forth an idea, and everyone else agrees to it, whether it's actually the right decision or not. There are a number of reasons why group brainstorming doesn't work. One of these is called social loafing. In a group, some individuals tend to sit back and let others do the work. The second is production blocking. Since only one person can talk or produce an idea at once, the other group members are often forced to sit passively. And the third is evaluation apprehension, meaning the fear of looking stupid in front of one's peers. You can take this meeting preparation one step further and do an activity called brain writing. This is where you either ask people to bring their ideas to the meeting, or set aside 10 minutes at the start of the meeting to allow people to read through the information and formulate their thoughts. Everyone can pass their ideas to the moderator, who will read through them for discussion. By giving people more context and information in advance, you may find that not only are new people surfacing ideas, but that your meetings may even be more efficient, since much of the work was done ahead of time. Before you schedule your next meeting, think about how you can make it more inclusive. If you have a meeting coming up, go ahead and send out a detailed agenda ahead of time, maybe with some prereading or items you want attendees to come prepared to discuss. Pay attention to how it changes the tone or cadence of your meeting, and ask a variety of folks on your team for feedback. This is just one of the ways to ensure your efforts at inclusivity extend beyond the hiring practice.

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